Discussants: Jamieson Webster and Rachel Boue

The analyst’s vitalizing activity, as reflected in the analyst’s invitation to be, in the offer to take in the analyst as an object of love, to receive what the analyst transmits, and the taking in of other components implicit through nonverbal means (through gaze and displaced touch) are all components of a healthy analytic process. These are all aspects of healthy maternal eroticism as well. In this presentation, the various components of maternal eroticism will be illustrated through my work with Petra. By attending to and responding within the multiverse of maternal eroticism (derived in particular from the work of Julia Kristeva), a process of transformation occurred where signifiers of the abject, previously residing in foreclosed spaces of the analysand’s mind, were accessed in the usable space of the analytic setting. The vitalizing and de-vitalizing capacities within maternal eroticism are dialectically related and represent (together) the mother’s vital gift to the child. In parallel, these components (and especially the re-vitalizing component) of maternal eroticism comprise the psychoanalyst’s gift to the vitality of the analysand.

Bio
Andrea Celenza, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is also Adjunct Faculty at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and The Florida Psychoanalytic Center. She has written numerous papers on love, sexuality and psychoanalysis and is on the Editorial Board of JAPA. She has two online courses and is the recipient of several awards. Her writings have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese and Farsi. Her third book, entitled, Transference, Love, and Being: Essential Essays from the Field, was published in 2022 by Routledge and she has two forthcoming works, Erotic Transferences: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, July, 2024) and a co-edited volume (with Murray Schwartz) of American Imago on Perverse Scenarios. Dr. Celenza is in private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA.